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While the new features may not matter to you, it makes devices much harder to develop for. This is one reason why Android versions of apps are worse compared to the same app on iOS.
But like you, security updates are very important to me. If I were ever going to switch to Android, I’d only consider getting a pixel. And I won’t consider that until it has a native desktop mode so I can essentially use it as my pc.
Are they worse? This seems outdated, but then, I haven't used an iOS phone as a daily driver, so maybe there's some magic making the iOS version of Google Maps so much better? I mean, it is true that it's harder to make Android apps, but a lot of that has to do with displays being arbitrary aspect ratios and resolutions across dozens of devices, more than anything else, at least if you're focusing on mainstream devices.
On the other issue, why not go Samsung? They are matching Google's "7 years of updates" thing and they DO have a pretty solid native desktop mode. I don't use Samsung devices these days for other reasons, but if that's the bar, I think they're meeting it.
Yeah, not just worse quality but also some apps don’t come to Android until months later.
Linus from tech tips has complained that the Android version of YouTube is missing features that iOS has.
Another commenter mentioned that someone did a switch to Android challenge and Instagram was missing features.
A chatgpt competitor has had an app for iOS for months and Android just got it, I think something similar happened with chatgpt.
It’s not just arbitrary screen size, it’s about with wide variety of specs that need to be supported. Your app needs to work on a crappy modern Android with a slow cpu and limited ram as well as the flagship stuff, its easier for the devs to make a one size fits all app instead of expanding how some features only work on some phones and keep track of all that.
Additionally, newer versions of Android will have better and more capable apis. But if only 12% of people are on the latest version of Android, then coding the app to use those apis would either break the app on old version of Android or they would have to have code for doing a task an old I efficient way and a newer better way. So they just do it the I efficient way.
Man, this is only tangentially related, but I've slowly drifted away from the garbage app economy over the years, huh? That paragraph literally had me going "Oh, right, people use Instagram on their phones and stuff", for different things like three or four times. No bearing to your point, but I will give myself some props.
Anyway, yeah, I'm not gonna stand here and say that iOS doesn't make more sense as a starting point, both due to their hardware and software consolidation AND their US-centric nature that tends to make it a more profitable first stop (although that margin has narrowed) or that full legacy Android support isn't more technically challenging. I think you're overrepresenting the memory issue, though. You'd be hard pressed to find a dirt cheap Android phone with less than what? 4/6 Gigs of RAM? For mobile apps that will condition how fast things load and how many background apps get held before being flushed, but it's not gonna be a massive challenge to make something run. And if it is, you should get that under control regardless.
About the rest of that list, I do think it's interesting how half-remembered it is. For a while Instagram photos "just looked better" to the point of it becoming a meme, but that hasn't been a thing on major Android phones for a couple of iterations, so it shouldn't matter to anybody buying a new phone today even if you're on Instagram (don't be on Instagram). I don't know about the "chatGPT" or "chatGPT competitors". Gemini, Copilot, ChatGPT and Perplexity have all been on Android for a while, not sure if it was all day one, but it was all certainly timely and available when I wanted to check it out. As for the LTT thing, I'm guessing from a google search, but was that about pop-up video being free on iPhone but part of the subscription on Android? Wasn't that a regional thing? In any case it wasn't a lack of support, it seems it was a guideline compliance thing. Not that I use the default Youtube app, but I'm guessing the Youtube guy wouldn't point that out.
All of the minutia aside, I will say that as an Android user it's been a long time since I went "wow, I wish that very useful app/feature/implementation" was available on my phone. I think the only things that came close to that were a couple of Apple Arcade exclusives I wish I could have purchased outright. It's no question that there is an extra demand for coverage and support on Android, but at this point the market is large enough and the processes well understood enough that this is a development issue, not an end user issue. By and large, mobile apps you want and hear about are available right away and work just fine across devices.
I watched a random video recently where an iPhone user tried to use an Android phone (a Z Flip 5) for a week and was surprised by how significant some of the differences between apps were. Like Instagram had entire features completely missing on Android that really annoyed her. Having never used Instagram, I had no idea feature parity was still that bad between the two operating systems when it came to mainstream apps like that. However, it's understandable I'd be so out of the loop because basically all my apps for the last few years have been FOSS and exclusive to Android and no one I know owns an iPhone so there has been no direct comparison for me to make.
Just switched from an iPhone 12 to a Pixel 8 and did not really notice any degradation in quality. I did miss native outlook.com support but other than that I only noticed that I can now use Firefox with real extensions. Everything else was on par.
Not a heavy user but AFAIK android has always been a second class citizen for Instagram. There used to be issues with different screen aspect ratios, resolutions, and scaling in general. Not sure if it's fixed on more exotic hardware (e.g. foldables), tablets are still kinda broken I believe. What do you expect if they can't be arsed to make the app simply scalable for different screens?
We're there any other apps that didn't have feature parity?
Android is great because of the foss apps. iOS doesn’t really have that. I think it’s due to no side loading and having to pay an annual fee to be a dev and needing to have a Mac to compile for iOS.